Wine, Continued (Hate Previous Title)

I'm sick again, Annika still sick. This will be short. Fooooorcing myself.

The restaurant was on a little dead end side street. It was open to the sidewalk, basically had three walls, so no matter where you were sitting, you were effectively sitting outdoors. It was a proverbial "hole in the wall," just the way I like it, if the food is as good as the atmosphere's shabby. We ordered the garlic soup, the roast chicken: the specialty of the house. There wasn't much more on the menu. The waiter brought us a basket of bread, ripped chunks of baguette. "Wine," he said, and we could tell it was meant to be a question, but one to which there was only one answer. We nodded. He didn't ask what kind we wanted; we didn't ask what kind he was bringing.

The jelly glasses he set on the table did not look like any of the wine glasses we'd encountered at any of our fancier meals. And the wine he poured into them, from a glass pitcher, no less, didn't either. It was pale yellowy-green, and effervescent. It looked like sprite, maybe, or a sparkling lemonade. "What is it?" I couldn't help but ask, in spite of his dismissive brusqueness.

"Vinho verde," he said.

I have forgotten to say that it was hot. Lisbon in July is baked dry. The air was vaguely dusty from the top layer of caked dirt in which somehow greenery still grew, flowers and shrubbery and trees. The sidewalks were hot, emanated heat like a baby with a fever, and the sun beamed down with uncanny precision; the skin where my hair parted was burned after one afternoon. And even though this restaurant was open to the air, had ceiling and floor fans running, it was hot there too, and the garlic soup worked that magic trick whereby hot broth makes you feel cooler by comparison, and the chicken was crisp-skinned and limey and garlicky, and even the chunks of bread were fresh, with a chewy crust that's surprisingly hard to come by.

But the wine. I had never tasted anything like it. It was cool and light and clean-tasting, so perfect a match for the garlic and lime and yes, the heat itself, that we drank glass after glass of it. And later, as we walked up and down the dusty winding streets, we didn't feel sleepy or heavy or regretful, the way one does sometimes after wine in the afternoon. We felt refreshed and even energized, and pleasantly, happily full.

This was the first time I remember realizing that there were wines and there were wines, and that when you somehow managed to match the wine to the meal to the occasion--whatever the wine happened to be--you had elevated the experience in a way nothing else quite could. Vinho verde, I learned later, is the national wine of Portugal. The people drink it like water, with every meal, in every setting, which is possible because of its low alcohol content, its bubbles. It is a classic example of terroir: a product from and of the earth that has produced it, and I will always remember that meal, that first sip of that wine, as an entry into a world I could suddenly glimpse and yearn for.